This is a "take-home" essay test. Select three questions among the five below prepare short essays in response.

Each short essay should be at least 400 words, and your essay should clearly articulate an insightful response to the question. Moreover, since you have time to work on the essay, I expect your writing to be free of grammatical and typographic errors.

This assignment is worth 15% of your final grade, and I will score it as 150 points. This score will further be divided into "content" and "clarity", worth 75 points each.

In this case "content" will assess the validity and insightfulness of your discussion, and "clarity" will assess the grammatical, typographic, and stylistic clarity of the way you present that discussion.

The focus should be on your own insights and interpretation, but if you do consult outside sources and incorporate them into your essays, you must include complete citation information.

This assignment is due October 20 by 5:00 PM.

Please turn this in by creating a Google Document and sharing it with zach.whalen@gmail.com.

Choose any three of the following to respond to

1. Scott McCloud discusses Magritte's "pipe" painting, "The Treachery of Images," in his book Understanding Comics (see attached JPG images). Consider McCloud's reading of this image, and compare or contrast it with Foucault's reading, as summarized and extended by W.J.T. Mitchell.
2. Keeping in mind that the flashforward in film or television demonstrates prolepsis and flashback demonstrates analepsis, find specific examples of either prolepsis or analepsis in Little Nemo or Krazy Kat. Discuss how comics conceive temporality in ways similar to or different from film.
3. Considering Barthes' reading of the Panzani advertisement, conduct a similar analysis of an advertising image of your own choosing. This could be from a magazine or newspaper or it could be one that you find online. Include a scan of the image, or link to it within your essay. Following Barthes' lead, locate it's linguistic message (if any) as well as it's symbolic and literal messages.
4. John Fell discusses Winsor McCay's innovations in visual storytelling (comics) that were latter adopted by filmmakers. Find specific examples of filmic visual strategies within Krazy Kat and compare or contrast them with those in Little Nemo.
5. Consider Foucault's notion of the "infinite relation" between images and language in contrast with Barthes' discussion of anchor and relay. Place these two thinkers in conversation and use your understanding of each to analyze the attached Far Side cartoon.